Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure, for example, relates to wireless communication systems, and more particularly to an edge computing device co-located with a small cell base station.
Description of Related Art
Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, space and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple wireless devices. Base stations may communicate with wireless devices on downstream and upstream links. Each base station has a coverage range, which may be referred to as the coverage area of the cell. Some of these base stations may be lower-powered base stations, such as a picocells, femtocells, or microcells. Such small cells cover a smaller geographic area than macro cells and allow access by user equipments (UEs) with service subscriptions with the network provider.
Current wireless wide area networks (WWANs) generally place content and cloud resources on nodes outside of the mobile network operator's WWAN, far from the wireless device of the end user accessing the nodes on the other side of the WWAN. Similarly, users of wireless local area networks (WLAN) generally access content and cloud resources on these nodes far from the WLAN, which makes the nodes likewise far from the wireless device of the end user accessing the WLAN. When an end user connected to a wireless network near the edge of the WWAN or in a WLAN requests content or services, via their wireless device, the content is generally downloaded from these nodes, through the WWAN or WLAN, and delivered to the wireless device via a radio link. Subsequent requests for the same content result in the content again being downloaded from the nodes through the WWAN or WLAN to the wireless device. In addition, video traffic has increased to an ever-larger proportion of data transmitted over WWANs and WLANs. Unpredictable spikes in demand due to viral videos and live television programming, increases in display and content resolution, and the introduction of enhanced user features have all contributed to this increased growth in data usage. Duplication of requested content can waste resources on the backhaul and transport networks. Similarly, during times of high demand where traffic congestion may occur, content delivery may be affected such that the user experience is reduced. For example, costs of providing the requested data may rise, latency or buffering may increase, and/or the quality of delivered data may be reduced, e.g. by transcoding video to a reduced quality level.
Furthermore, wireless devices may have limited battery life and processing power, in particular mobile devices. Applications and processes running on a wireless device, including to decode and encode content for transmission on the WWAN or WLAN, may use significant mobile device resources. Execution of these applications and processes may shorten battery life and degrade device performance.